UNITED NATIONS, Oct. 27 (Xinhua) -- The United Nations' conflict prevention processes need radical reform to ensure they are proactive instead of merely responsive to crises, and to take human rights fully into account, a UN human rights expert said Friday.
Current efforts to prevent conflict were "reactive, ineffective, often incoherent, and neither holistic nor strategic in preventing violence or avoiding recurrence," Pablo de Greiff, UN special rapporteur on transitional justice, told the UN General Assembly.
"Prevention is not a form of crisis response. It goes much further than early warning efforts," de Greiff said. "There are good reasons to make sure that countries on the brink of violent conflict do not fall off that particular cliff."
Prevention work needed a wider focus and had to be brought into processes earlier, said the special rapporteur.
"None of the efforts thus far illustrate what prevention would mean in terms of content, none puts flesh on the bones of the links between prevention and human rights," he said.
